Yes: love.
Keith meowed, and I lumped out his portion: it was tuna and cod in jelly. Then I stood up with the empty tin in my hand and breathed in its horrible fishy fumes. It made my eyes water. If it weren’t for Keith and the Hoggs, I thought, from now on I’d be completely alone.
But I didn’t tell John the bit about loving my family. He wouldn’t have understood, any more than Gwynneth and Tiffany could.
– You can’t relate to real people, that’s your trouble! Gwynneth would squawk at me.
– Yeah, Tiffany would echo, what about us? D’you think we’re a couple of plastic replicas or something?
– So what happened? went John. Who busted you?
I sighed. The papier mâché was drying on my hands. Picking off the little lumps can be very satisfying. You crumble them into a heap, or flick them individually. Picture the port-hole as the target. I’ve stuck on a little red sticker, dead-centre, for the bull’s-eye. I hit it, once. Power for the Powerless!
It was a cloudy day in July; I remember the month, because it was just after the Festival of Choice, and there were still these tatters of paper floating about in the air from the celebrations, and shrivelledy-looking helium balloons in the shape of the Bird of Liberty tethered to people’s dish aerials. With G and T long gone, I was alone in the house, apart from Keith. He was purring on my lap while I clicked away. I’d trained him to knead his claws on the fabric of the chair, rather than in my flesh. I liked him sitting on me, while I worked. It gave me companionship, and a nice warm feeling in the groin.
– I’m in my office, transferring ten thousand from my uncle’s account into my mum’s, I explain to John, before ransacking one of my kid brother’s off-shore companies to pay for the money that’s owed to one of Mum’s companies in the Cayman Islands. This is after she’s borrowed at exorbitantly high interest from my big sister’s Costa Rican offshore development loan scheme. Which in turn owes it – plus interest – to one of my uncle’s Martinique outfits.
– I think I’m with you, goes John. (As if!)
– Anyway, the point is, thirty K’s at stake this morning.
– Right, he goes.
– Then there’s a ring at the doorbell.
– You opened it?
I wish I could have said that I had a hunch, an instinct not to respond to it. But the doorbell rang a lot. Dispatch riders, takeaway deliveries, the ironing service, the weekly tele-shop. Keith jumped off my lap at the sound of the doorbell, hoping for pepperoni and pineapple pizza, his favourite.
– I thought it was a bike delivery. I was expecting some cash after the last transaction, I say.
– And who was it?
– My daughter.
I add an extra lump of papier mâché to her bum, and grit my teeth.
Yes: Tiffany. In smart orange-and-blue Libertyforce uniform.
Tiff had always been her mother’s daughter. From the moment she was born, they were a little female confederacy, plotting oestrogen-type stuff together while I concocted cash. Girly kitchen things at first, gingerbread men and so forth, then women things, men of the non-gingerbread variety. It was pretty much an open secret. What could I do about it? As a family man, I was a failure. I’d never got close to her. I loved her but I didn’t know her. Gwynneth behaved as though she was the only parent, and I was just a… oh, just a feature of the home landscape. It was weird, I thought – but what did I know about family life? Perhaps it was normal. Perhaps, I thought, if Tiffany’d been a boy, it would’ve been different. We’d have gone to ball games or ostrich races or whatever the big thing was. Anyway, the more Gwynneth resented me for my lack of ‘social skills’ the more I retreated into my shell.
As soon as Tiffany was old enough to understand, Gwynneth told her that Daddy preferred another mummy and daughter. It wasn’t strictly true, not in the beginning, but the saying of it polluted everything and after a while I thought, well, sod it, so what if I do prefer them. Who wouldn’t? After that I kept myself to myself in the loft conversion with the Hoggs. At least G and T can’t hate me for funding their shopping trips, I thought.
Wrong.
– You’re under arrest, says Inspector Tiffany Kidd, still parked on the doorstep by the banana tree and the dwarf Alpines. She’s bigger, more substantial, harder-faced than I remember her. Canteen food. It’s bulked her up. There’s a Libertyforce van out in the road behind her in the road, Fraud Squaddies tumbling out on to the front grass. She flashes a plastic-covered search warrant at me, and an ID card showing an unflattering hologram of her own face, and I have time to think, what crappy paperwork.
– Don’t think you don’t deserve this, she says briskly.
It crosses my mind that I might be hallucinating. Computers can frazzle you that way, short-circuit your nodes.
– What the fuck d’you think you’re doing? I yell at her. What is this stupid game?
As the forcies pile out of the van, she shucks me off like an old raincoat.
– Common Assault, Article 5D, Libertycare Customer Charter! she yaps. Impound his computers! De-activate his hard discs! Confiscate all CD ROMs and floppies!
And the uniformed gophers swarm through the house.
– That family paid for you to go to that posh school with the netball and the oboe lessons! I yell at her.
She just stands there, her eyes flashing with a hatred so pure that it could be bottled and sold as a multi-purpose repellent.
– That family paid for your snow-breaks and your designer labels from all those fucking boutiques!
A spotty youngster joins her at this point.
– All right, there, ma’am?
I throw in my last card.
– Not to mention your abortion!
I make sure I say it loud and clear. The young forcie looks at the Lemon, and then at the floor.
– Slap him in cuffs, she spits.
And lo, it came to pass that, like a common criminal, I was shoved into the back of a Libertyforce van stinking of junk food. I was in shock. I felt numb.
– All right there, mate? asked the spotty forcie who was now attached to me by handcuffs, like an outsized and gormless gnome dangling from a charm bracelet. With his free hand he was feeding himself Chicken McNuggets from a greasy cardboard bucket.
– All right? My entire family has just been wiped out. Do YOU reckon I’m all right?
I thought Inspector Kidd was your family, he goes, all jovially. He’s munching an evil-smelling nugget. She seems to be alive and well.
The Lemon was sitting in the front of the van; I could see the back of her head through the glass.
– She’s not family, as far as I’m concerned. (I said it loudly, hoping she could hear it.) – Real families are loyal. Real families don’t fuck you about. Real families honour and respect their dad.
The forcie laughed aloud.
– See you’ve got a good sense of humour then, mate, he went.
I couldn’t think of anything to add that was in words, so I spat on the floor. And on that note we drove off.
It was one of Tiffany’s subordinates who interrogated me at the copshop at Staggerworth Junction in South District. He wanted names, dates, all that stuff.
– It’s all on the discs, I told him.
– And your password?
– Moron, I said. He noted it down without a flicker.
– What’s the prognosis then, doc? I asked him.
He looked at me questioningly for a moment.
– Oh. This type of fraud, you’re usually looking at ten years, in my experience.
– Ten years? Cue the classic line from me, about wanting Libertyaid. Knowing my rights.